Hey from Steve,
Welcome to the tenth Friday newsletter. My aim is to give you the most helpful news and updates for WordPress publishers. If you want more regular updates, join our Facebook group.
Indiegraf is a fast-growing platform for WordPress publishers
Indiegraf is a 3-year old company that is having a positive impact for many WordPress publishers.
They’re a WordPress hosting platform for publishers, in a similar space to Newspack, PaywallProject, Lede, and others.
There’s a big need for these platforms. Publishers want someone to solve their tech and business problems at an affordable price.
Vox moves to WordPress and the Coral comments system survives
Around one month ago, I covered the news that Vox shut down its own CMS and went all-in on WordPress.
The WordPress VIP team followed up this week with an official announcement. There’s not much that’s new in this, but they did confirm that two Vox products will continue: “The partnership will make advertising platform Concert and its community platform Coral available to WordPress VIP customers as a new offering for publishers.”
Concert is a SaaS platform, but Coral is open source, fully-featured and available and very active on Github. There’s a WordPress plugin ready to install, although you do need to also install and maintain your own copy of Coral. Here’s the original introduction to Coral when it went live on The Verge. There is certainly room for a product like this for WordPress publishers.
More links for WordPress publishers
The Wausau Pilot & Review is a small WordPress-powered publisher using Newspack. They made national news this week after being sued by a local businessman.
Facebook seems to getting out of the news business. CNN reports some data, and so does The Narwhal. They are one of the sites I refer to most often when people ask for examples of exciting new journalism. We covered them back in 2020. They sent out a newsletter this week with details of their traffic challenges. Their Facebook traffic is cratering: “many of you reading this probably initially discovered The Narwhal through Facebook. In 2019, Facebook drove 54 per cent of The Narwhal’s total traffic. By 2021, that number had been cut in half. And so far in 2023, Facebook has accounted for just six per cent of readers to our site.” Unfortunately, more problems may be on the way as a result of Canada’s “Online News Act”.
If your publication uses image heavily, check out the new aspect ratios feature in WordPress 6.3. This allows you to be really consistent with image display, no matter what images your users upload.
Thanks for reading. I build WordPress tools for publishers at PublishPress, TaxoPress, MetaSlider, and Logtivity. Here at KinshiPress I write about what I’m seeing with publishers we deal with each day. This newsletter uses the Newsletter Glue plugin. Click here to email me anything, including tips for future issues.
Steve Burge